ZombiU is a game I’ve had for a while, played for a bit and
never got past the first few parts. I came back to it a couple of weeks ago and
after having some difficulty getting started, I managed to beat it last
Thursday with an unexpected day off work. Let’s see how it worked out:
ZombiU was one of the WiiU’s launch titles. First person Survival
Horror games are nothing new, and ZombiU doesn’t do anything different with the
theme. The notable differences are: It’s set in London, it makes use of the
WiiU controller, and there are Rogue-like elements.
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| They'll drive you batty... |
The London setting works; it is familiar to me as I am from
the UK, but only in an aesthetic sense as I don’t live anywhere near London and
even if I did, I don’t know enough about the interiors of Buckingham Palace and
the Tower of London (two of the game’s key locations) to make a comparison.
Neither, I suspect, do the developers, who appear to recognise London and its
people as overblown caricatures, and presumably have never been inside
Buckingham Palace either, as from what I understand about the place you don’t just
‘go in.’
The WiiU touch pad contributes to certain aspects of the
game, like aiming some of the heavier guns, adding and removing barricades, and
inventory management. The latter is where it helps the most; you can add and
remove items from your inventory with tablet-like functionality, and it can be
used as extra buttons to select your weapons and equipment in real-time, rather
than having to pause the game.
The Rogue-like elements come in to play when your character
dies. You respawn as a different character, with limited weapons and equipped
with whatever you stored at your safe house. The game itself doesn’t change;
nothing you killed during your previous run will respawn, except that your
previous character is now a Zombie. You need to kill them to reach the
equipment that they had; if your new character dies before you manage this,
that equipment is gone forever and late in the game, that’s a nasty business
indeed.
The game took a while to get going but I enjoyed it once it
did. You’re guided by a disembodied northern voice called “The Prepper,”
through the speaker on the WiiU controller. He initially teaches you the skills
you need to survive. Later in the game you find yourself at odds with him as
other people turn up and give you things to do, as Prepper seems to think there
is no point in trying to escape the city; he tells you that your only chance is
to survive. But, as is often the case, things are never as they seem...
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| So this turned out to be a thing. Not a nice moment of the game! |
The game is challenging, thrilling and scary in the right
places. There’s just the right amount of “panic” moments where you find
yourself unexpectedly surrounded by zombies, and some well-paced jump-scares.
There’s some optional world-building documents to collect, but you’re not
obliged to read them to progress. The campaign rewards a careful, methodical
approach to progression, and punishes over-confident hubris. The controls can
be fiddly, but I believe it better represents the ‘everyman’ survivors you’re
playing. However some of the dialogue requires some suspension of disbelief to
accommodate the different survivors. For example, there is a section where you
fetch an item for a doctor. You’ll probably have died several times by the time
you return– but he talks as though he recognises you and makes no mention you
being a different person!
I beat the game, but there’s a post-credits sequence that
determines the ending. To get the better ending you need to escape the city via
helicopter, but as you make your way there, you’re surrounded by zombies that
respawn for the only time in the game. I didn’t beat this; I didn’t have enough
firepower left to deal with the zombies effectively, and I’d forgotten which
way I was supposed to go and ran in to fire. There is a Survivor mode – where
you have to beat the entire game with one survivor – and some multiplayer
modes. I haven’t looked at these yet, but they’re there if I need them!
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